Supranational State Power: The European Union, CapitalMarkets and the Political Economy of the Digital and Green Transition

In seeking to transform the European economy into a green and digital economy, the European Union is transforming into a state-like entity. The recent initiatives by the European Commission on Capital Markets Union (CMU) and the European Venture Capital Market show the development of the first European VC fund to take direct equity stakes and co-invest in innovative firms. This shift has not been accounted for by the current political economy literature. Interrogating the political responses of the EU to the challenges of the green and digital transformation I ask how this regulatory process has played out over the last decade, and what interests serve this new trend. But most importantly, I am interested in understanding how the attempts to build a legal infrastructure that favors the green and digital transition is transforming the nature of European politics. I will rely on an innovative set of mixed methods, in particular quantitative text analysis and interviews. Through text analysis and text reuse, I will be able to uncover hidden patterns of influence and coordination, bothfor financial and non-financial firms, domestically and transnationally. I will illustrate the origins of economic discourses and new discursive figures, and how the policies have evolved from one stage to another. Relying on interviews with senior policy-makers and industry representatives I will make causal claims about theunderlying motivations of actors.